Is this the end of POE?

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Bars wrote:

The Awakening was a major change in the player vs. game power balance. Player power went down, game difficulty went up.

List of player power nerfs:

Spoiler

- Mjolner and Windripper nerfed, thus continuing the tendency for uniques in this game to be either useless or underwhelming
- the leech fiasco - I mean, who thought having stuff like '0,2% damage leeched' would be a good idea?! Even from a purely psychological standpoint?
- bloodrage reworked - a buff for life-based builds and a kick in the nuts for ES builds
- the inexplicable reduced mana change - this horse has been beaten to death, no need to continue
- Ondars eviscerated
- CwdT nerfed to not work with totems and warcries
- Immortal Call nerf: it was necessary but I have to include it in the list
- shotgun removed, essentially making most projectile spells trash
- frenzy charges buffed but made more inaccessible, trashing flickerstrike in the process (ironically, flickerstrike received a camera fix at last - too bad no one uses it anymore)
- MoM / EB made weaker and more difficult to use, Cloak of Defiance made invisible
- CI and lowlife turned into ineffective and expensive niche builds
- some people say melee was buffed, but that's not exactly true: life-based, tanky, armoured melee went much higher up the power scale, but the global increase of monster damage turned evasion and ES-based melee into a niche softcore build for people with a lot of money who don't mind dying occasionally
- map drops decreased significantly, forcing players to play more dangerous map mods and further pigeonholing player
- elemental proliferation heavily nerfed, flameblast turned from cookie cutter to niche, traps.. what traps?
- global monster damage increase, turning evasion into Russian Roulette, ES/CI into giants with clay feet and making huge amounts of flat physical reduction a must (hello, Lightning Coil and armour builds)
- Lightning Coil and other good uniques made much rarer (the irony)

As a result, GGG destroyed what was PoE's main selling point: diversity and theorycrafting possibilities. PoE has always had a few superior builds, but pre-2.0 it was different. There was a wider selection of top-end builds, and there were a lot of subpar but still completely functional builds for the non-powergamers. The Awakening changed the picture completely. It created a much narrower set of top-end builds which can deal with the ramped up challenge, there are some fringe builds which can somehow deal with it, most of them only softcore viable, and that's it. I love theorycrafting and build testing, I thought about dozens of builds, tried 6-7 in Warbands and Tempest and in the end nothing came even close to incinerate builds, which I used, and a few other tier 1 skills I didn't want to use. (author's note: I have many deleted and fully respecced characters and I regularly give my gear away, my character sheet is not indicative of everything I've tried). What's more, they pigeonholed us not only in a few skills, but also in a few items.

Combined with the map changes which turned high-end maps into a luxury and forced most players to grind maps way below their character's capabilities, a decline in players was bound to happen. What's more, it was obvious to me and many other players and we wrote at great length about that as early as closed beta. This is perhaps what bothers me the most: are really GGG's balance team so blind to what should be obvious? Even if they didn't see it, how could they still fail to acknowledge it when it was repeated time and again in feedback by hundreds of players? I used to write in the feedback sections, but at some point it just felt meaningless, so I stopped.


TLDR: The Awakening made players weaker and monsters stronger and destroyed PoE's main strength, build versatility. Also, I'm mad that GGG ignores good, solid feedback or listens to it too late.